Explosions in Egypt

After
two weeks of massive anti-government demonstrations throughout Egypt, the
military has removed President Mohamed Morsi from office a year after he was
elected by a solid majority of the Egyptian people. The opposition has argued
that Morsi has been an abject failure. The ensuing debate as to whether this
was a military coup is essentially irrelevant. A duly elected president has
been removed from office by the military, who quickly replaced him with the Chief
Justice of the Constitutional Court, pending new elections. According to General Abdel Fattah el-Sissi,
Egypt’s highest-ranking military officer, the military wants to distance itself
from the political process and wants to be seen as the protector of democracy,
in a stable, non-violent environment –as is true in Turkey. Like Turkey, the
military in Egypt today, unlike the case as recently as the 1980s, does not
want to control the government. While the
military still plays a vital role in determining who rules in much of the
Middle East, in most cases it does not want to hold political power itself—at
least for now.

Predictably,
many voices now have surfaced arguing that Egypt’s march to democracy has been
seriously damaged. In an editorial in the New York
Times, Samer Shehata argues that we are seeing a struggle between Morsi and his
Muslim Brotherhood, who were elected by democratic means but are not liberals,
and an opposition that is liberal, but not democratic. As clever and rhetorically enticing as
Shehata’s argument is, it misses the point. Shehata and his cohorts—including
the Obama administration and the Bush administration before it—apply modern,
Western democratic standards to situations and places that are devoid of any
democratic traditions and have little understanding of democratic
procedure. In the modern era, Egypt has
experienced control by imperial Britain, and then lived under a monarchy until a
revolution in 1952 overthrew the regime of King Farouk and destroyed the
traditional Egyptian aristocracy. Until
2012, the country was controlled by a tight oligarchy of military and civilian
autocrats. Democracy, as we understand
it in the West, was nowhere part of the Egyptian experience.

Democracy
per se is not the issue. As Winston Churchill famously noted,
“democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest.” Democracy is a form of government to be
envied and desired. The problem is that attaining democracy is an evolutionary
process. It cannot be overlaid as whole cloth over a society and political
community that has not experienced and embraced the underpinnings of democracy:
regularly scheduled elections, political parties, popular elections, representative
parliamentary rule, peaceful change of government accepted by all parties and,
perhaps most important of all, civil society.

Despite the fact that Egypt has experienced
none of this, the West expects Egypt and similar societies to accept and adapt modern
democratic procedures and attitudes tabula
rasa. Not only is this impossible for
the societies in question, it betrays smug arrogance and historical amnesia on
the part of the West. The now great
democracies of the West attained their political systems through an
evolutionary progression of history, not as the product of an instant implantation
of a foreign system. For example, it has
taken the United States and France 200 years to achieve what they have accomplished. Although the evolution has been much longer
for Britain, it has been the teacher for the modern democratic world. Democracy
is the product of a process; it is not the product of instantaneous results.

Egypt
and much of the Middle East is at the threshold of this process. It is much more important for Egypt to go
through a process of trial and error than it is for Egypt to attain magically
the right democratic formula. There is
no “democratic handbook” for Egypt, just as there is no such source for any
society craving democracy. There will be
times, as is now that case, to step back, take a breath, recalibrate, and try
again. Eventually Egyptians will get
there, at their own pace and according to their own values. And, yes, at times
it may be necessary for the military to step in and restore order and
stability—as long as they know when to step out again. Hectoring, lecturing, and pressure from the
West not only will not help advance the democratic process in exactly those
countries we want to help, it will denigrate the accomplishments of the West.

Capital Commentary is a weekly current-affairs publication of the Center for Public Justice. Published since 1996, it is written to encourage the pursuit of justice. Commentaries do not necessarily represent an official position of the Center for Public Justice but are intended to help advance discussion.